How do you know if finding your passion is achievable? Will you love what you are doing? But wait a minute. Nothing is that simple is it?
Check out our thoughts on team leverage.
Check out what Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon, tells us:
” One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions. Your love chooses you”.
Are you continuously working to find what you love to do? Perhaps starting with your personal development? An excellent idea these days … where to change is the name of the game. Aim high. Explore. Stretch your boundaries. Let yourself fail some. But be sure and put learning in your skill bag.
An experiment gone wrong doesn’t have to mean someone goofed. In a culture of growth, it should say that you tried something new, measured the results, and learned that the change didn’t help the bottom line. If your tests are always successful, you’re probably not testing often enough or aggressively enough.
Still, it’s important that failures, like testing itself, be directed and carefully measured. Before you start issuing a quarterly failure report, make sure you’ve trained everyone on best practices for driving growth through testing and experimentation. You should have clear, repeatable frameworks and methodologies for testing that everyone can (and does) follow.
All of these are useful to remember for growing knowledge of your enablers for success. Enablers for success that are essential for your personal and professional development and in doing what you love.
We are all aware of Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech given in 2005, where he talks about doing what you love. It is an excellent discussion on this subject. He encourages his student audience to keep looking and don’t settle. Jobs goes on to say as with all matters of the heart; you’ll know when you find it. Ah, but finding it.
To do something well, you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. And often unattainable for some.
I recently read an interesting book on the topic of how to find what you love to do. The book is by Cal Newport: So Good They Can’t Ignore You. The themes in Newport’s book are bound by a common thread: the importance of ability. His thesis is that the things that do a great job great are rare and valuable.
If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect the job that you love.
Mastery by itself is not enough to guarantee your enjoyment and satisfaction: The many examples of well-respected but miserable workaholics support this claim.
The main thread of the argument moves beyond the mere acquisition of useful skills and into the subtle art of investing career capital into the right types of working life traits. The path to what you love – at least as it concerns what you do for a living – is more complicated than simply answering the classic question “What should I do with my life?”
So here is the kicker from this book: when it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice. In fact, it is seriously flawed. It not only fails to describe how most people end up with compelling careers but for many people, it can make things worse: leading to constant job shifting and unrelenting angst.
“Follow your passion” might just be the worst possible advice. OK then, what should you do instead? Don’t follow your passion; rather, let it support you in your quest to become so good that they can’t ignore you.
Move your focus away from finding the right work, toward building your skills and expertise in what you do, and then eventually develop a love for what you do.
If a young Steve Jobs had taken his advice and decided only to pursue work he loved, we would probably have been one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice.
Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break – a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off. Probably works that way for a significant percentage of us, doesn’t it?
Think of it in another way: The most likely predictor of someone seeing their job as a calling is the number of years spent on the job. The more experience they have, the more skills and expertise they have developed and the likely they are to love their work.
